As Jean-Paul Sartre observed, “In football,
everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.” Applied to the
situation in Yugoslavia at the end of the 1980s, football was very complicated
indeed.

During that period, football stadia across the
country became breeding grounds for nationalist conflicts, especially between
football fans from Serbia and Croatia. Yugoslavia, at that point, was facing
deep internal crises, economic as well as political, while interethnic tensions
between the constituent nations were driving the country further towards what
seemed like an inevitable dissolution.

Like most of Western Europe during the 1980s,
Yugoslavia had serious problems to do with hooliganism and football violence.
While in Britain, Margaret Thatcher was cracking down on the so called “slum
game played in slum stadiums watched by slum people”, the roots of football
related violence in Yugoslavia were of a different nature.

Newly formed fan groups, created mostly during that
decade, very soon changed their focus from regular football rivalry to national
issues. Chants of ethnic hatred echoed around stadia – more incredible if one
considers that overt displays of nationalism were a still a crime in Yugoslavia.
The stadium became the “national vanguard”, a voice amplifier for nationalist
rhetoric, creating a vast space for manipulation within the beautiful game.

The
war did (not) begin at Maksimir

Things came to a head at the club game between
Dynamo Zagreb vs. Red Star Belgrade on 13 May 1990. The venue was Maksimir stadium
in Zagreb and the riots began before the match had even kicked off. The game
was never finished, and it’s a miracle it was even started. The riots set off a
chain of events which heavily influenced the ongoing crisis in Yugoslavia on a
political as well as symbolic level.

The match between Dynamo and Red Star was played two
weeks after the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), under the leadership of Franjo
Tuđman, won the first free parliamentary elections in Croatia. The HDZ’s ultra-nationalistic
program, complementary to that of the successors of the Communist Party under Slobodan
Milošević, did not inspire hope for a peaceful solution to the Yugoslav crisis.
In this respect, the actions of the two fan groups – Red Star’s Delijes and
Dynamo’s Bad Blue Boys – was not the least bit surprising.

The war of course did not begin at Maksimir, but the
epilogue of this never ended game wasn’t just a massive fight between the
supporters and the police, but also some important political machinations, most
notably Croatian police evicting the Serbian managerial staff from the stadium.
The riots on Maksimir stadium just accelerated the on-going process of
disintegration, while football - thanks to the phrase “The war started at
Maksimir”, which was coined and heavily exploited immediately after the match -
became an inevitable symbolic factor in explanations of the Yugoslav crisis.

Ritual
violence goes real

The consequences of this marriage between football
and nationalism weren’t just symbolic. In May 1991, Red Star Belgrade achieved the
greatest success in Yugoslav footballing history, by winning the European
Champion Clubs' Cup (precursor to the Champions League). This extraordinary
success wasn’t perceived only as a huge sporting triumph - the club’s
outstanding result was actually seen as an accomplishment of the whole Serbian
nation, despite the fact that the Red Star squad represented the whole of Yugoslavia,
with its team containing star players from almost every nation of the country.

However, the Serbian regime and its ideologists used
this success as a way to stoke the flames of ethnic nationalism that were
pervading the country. It was even claimed that Red Star, together with the Belgrade
daily newspaper Politika and the Serbian
Academy of Science and Arts, represents one of so-called “Pillars of Serbhood”.
At the same time, and especially after the Maksimir riots, the most extreme
parts of Red Star fan group fell under the influence of Željko Ražnatović (Arkan),
a notorious criminal later
indicted by the International Criminal Court for War Crimes in The Hague.

Under
Arkan’s command, the Serbian Volunteers Squad was formed, the majority of which
came from the Red Star’s Delije group, while a large number of the Croatian
football fan groups joined the units of the Croatian army in the making. As
noted by Serbian ethnologist Ivan Čolović, in the years before the war football fans from the
former Yugoslavia had a sort of premilitary training in the stadia. Soon they would
exchange the flags and banners for rifles and bombs.

Hence, starting from the end of the 1980s, the
stadia across former Yugoslavia served as a vanguard for the forthcoming
eruption of ethnic violence. The virtual shift from ritual violence to real and
bloody warfare, and the dominant nationalist politics in the states became
social actors with strong political influence. When ritual aggression
overflowed from the stadia to other social spaces, violence became socially and
politically legitimized. The entire social milieu during the 1990s functioned
in this key, allowing for the violence and
aggression to become normal social behaviour and a legitimate way of achieving
political goals.

Croatian sociologist Srdjan Vrcan argues that
through a specific synergy of the state, para-state and ostensibly reprivatized
violence, fan groups were no longer condemned as hooligans. They deserved a new
status; one legitimised through alleged patriotism.

However, in comparison with similar cases like in
neighbouring Croatia, Serbia’s unique development during the 1990s prevented the
national football team from playing a major role in national homogenization.
The national squad during the 1990s actually played under the name and symbols
of Yugoslavia, representing the country constituted only by Serbia and
Montenegro, but still keeping the symbols of the former state, like the
national anthem and the flag, though without the socialist five-pointed star
symbol.

The symbolic heritage of the former state wasn’t at all acceptable for
the “proven patriots” of the fan groups, hence the games of the national team
were massively boycotted. Even if the crowd was present in the stadium, the
obligatory part of the ritual was booing the national anthem, or chanting
slogans like: “Red Star Serbia, never Yugoslavia!” The only exceptions were
matches against the “old foes”, such as a match against Croatia in 1999.

Football
fans as a political factor

After the fall of the Milosevic regime in October
2000, the new Serbian government promoted a politics radically different from
the old style, officially distancing themselves from former nationalistic
projects. These radical changes, though, didn’t correspond very much with
reality, from everyday politics to football.

Actually, the opposite happened. Extreme football
fans kept their positions unaffected due to their mythic role in overthrowing
Milosevic and his regime. According to legend, the real struggle against the
Milosevic regime started at the Red Star stadium after massive riots and fights
with the police.

The “true patriots” now gained a new aura of
“revolutionary heroes”, additionally strengthening their legitimacy and
authority regarding many political issues, with a special emphasis on topics
connected with the question of the so-called “national interest”.

Consequently, the new government continued to treat
fan groups as a relevant political subject. As a result, a significant number
of incidents happened during the first decade of 2000s, starting with political
slogans such as “Kosovo is Serbia”, and an open support of those indicted for
war crimes, such as Ratko Mladić or Radovan Karadžić, along with open outbursts of ethnic hatred, including
banners with slogans such as “Knife, Wire, Srebrenica”.

None of these
incidents have been prosecuted, nor has there been much of a wider public
condemnation. Political legitimacy of football fans and their influence on
everyday politics could be seen in the case of the banned Gay Pride
Manifestation in 2011, when the government, mainly under the pressure of
extreme football fans, decided to cancel the event with the explanation that it
was not possible to guarantee the safety to the participants.

Despite the fact that the publicly proclaimed
political goals of the contemporary government in Serbia, to some extent,
represents a discontinuity with the former nationalist projects, these
narratives are still present in the discourse of football. A good example is a
statement given by the former president of the Red Star Football Club: “To be a
Red Star fan means to be a Serb! They tried to destroy us, to impose some
Yugoslav clubs as a Serbian brand, to cheat on people. They didn’t succeed, because
to attack Red Star means to attack Serbia, and the destiny of those who stormed
Serbia is well known throughout history!”

A similar kind of public discourse can be
distinguished in the recent case of Adem Ljajic, a Muslim member of the Serbian
national team, whose decision not to sing the national anthem led Serbian coach
Sinisa Mihajlovic to ban the player from the squad. Referring to the so-called
“cult of the national team”, Mihajlovic has actually perpetuated a well-known
mechanism where ethnic and religious identity is seen as equivalent to
citizenship. However, a soft reaction from the public, as well as the
prevailing condemnation of the coaches’ decision, suggest that this kind of
aspiration towards national homogenization doesn’t have the same public support
as it used to.

Political and cultural elites in Serbia still
carefully listen to the messages coming from the stands, whether they get the
etiquette of “national traitor” or “true patriot”, and the violence coated with
patriotism as a higher goal still represents an instrument of pressure in
political struggle. Once released and legitimized, the spirit of ethnic hatred
can’t be easily brought back in the bottle.

However, the poor state of Serbian
football in the neoliberal world, with clubs living on the edge of existence,
and the national team without results and support, gives almost no space for
any kind of homogenization, national included. If during the 1990s Serbia
didn’t have enough bread, but had plenty of games, at this point it seems that
the country is left without either.

About the author

Ivan Djordjevic is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the Faculty of
Philosophy, University of Belgrade. He is currently an associate researcher at
the Institute of Ethnography SASA in Belgrade.

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